Jasmine Ng co-director of Eating Air and award winning Lonely Planet documentaries is premiering her new documentary PINK PADDLERS, about a gang of Singaporean Breast Cancer Survivors’ bid to win the International Dragon Boat Competition. I have seen it and highly recommend it, it is moving, unexpectedly funny and I learnt alot. It is premiering on 26 March, 8pm ($30,$50), all proceeds go to Unifem and the Breast Cancer Foundation. If I had enough money, I would buy tickets for all my friends and family, male and female, its essential watching. Buy a ticket Trailer, Ticket info

NYT 14 Feb, “Filmmakers, film-industry types and the journalists who love them often refer to something called the festival circuit, a sequence of hectic, semi-glamorous events that crowd the calendar and circle the globe. But it might be more accurate to speak of a festival system: a complicated, ever-expanding web in which the interests of commerce, art and criticism converge, sometimes in harmony and sometimes at cross-purposes.

Any festival is contingent, ephemeral, something of a pseudo-event. When it is over, there is a brief flurry of evaluation — Toronto was strong this year, Sundance was disappointing, whatever — but those judgments tend to fade as the movies themselves, the ostensible point of the whole enterprise, make their way in the world, or into oblivion, or onto the next festival.” Cont’d reading NYT

I am pleased to announce that Singapore GaGa is now available at HMV (Heeren and Citilink) in addition to it being available at Earshot, Kinokuniya, Books Actually, Objectifs, Asylum. As I said, we are BIG! Full listings here

There is always a department in film festivals called “Film Traffic” which has an army of people, usually volunteers, who make sure that all the film reels are in tact, cleaned and taped together in the right order for its screening. It is a thankless but a very very important job. I know this because years ago in the 90s, we had a rare screening of Edward Yang’s, A Brighter Summer Day in Singapore. Its rare event anywhere because the film is 3 plus hours long and the film hard to get. Anyway, the projectionist played the reels in the wrong order, for the three parts of the film, parts 2,3 were switched around. Sadly, a swathe of Singaporean’s know the film the wrong way round. The funny (though inexcusable) thing was, even in the wrong order, the film was still great. Now that takes real skill. This post is dedicated to them tape traffic people. The stills below are from the Rotterdam Film Festival 06 Film Traffic Room